How to Recover Files from Formatted or Re-partitioned External Hard Drive

by John

"I wanna know how to recover files from Seagate drive, I accidentally formatted Seagate external hard drive resulting in file loss, completely forgot those photos stored on it ". This is a very common topic in the community, almost every week there are a couple guys to ask how to recover files from formatted external hard drive, how to recover data from re-partitioned external hard drive, RAW external hard drive data recovery etc. I guess most of PC users meet the similar predicament. The more frequently you use the computer, the more likely you lost data. So it becomes important to know what can make data loss, how to avoid it, and how to recover deleted or lost files if the tragedy has happened.

There are many reasons which can cause data loss:

Raw partition, external hard drive displays as RAW or 'Media/Drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?

Data become inaccessible because of virus infection, wrongly/incompletely formation or partition etc...

How to Avoid the Data Loss from External Hard Drive?

The cheapest and most convenient way to regularly back up your files, photos, videos, documents, excels to different locations such as external drives, cloud storage. It’s said OneDrive will allow business users roll back to any versions of documents in last 30 days. Why not try to back up to cloud drives? Don’t use “Shift + delete” button to delete files or folders, at least you have a chance to get the files back from recycle bin. Certainly it doesn’t work if you empty your recycle bin. Install antivirus and run it regularly to avoid that the file and computer suffer the virus attack. Correctly partition and format your disks and please make a copy of crucial data before executing them. Take good care of your external drives like USB drive, SD Card, Flash Card, Pen drive, Memory Card, don’t let them get corrupted or damaged.

How to Recover Files from External Hard Drive

If you unluckily file loss from external hard drive due to formatted, re-partitioned or deleted, you could try the external hard drive data recovery software to get them back. Few of people know, the lost files still exist on the external hard drive as long as it isn’t covered by new writing data, but it’s invisible to us. So we need 3rd software to assist us to get the data back. The external hard drive data recovery software I recommend you try is iBeesoft Data Recovery. It is a powerful, easy to use data recovery software. It allows you to easily recover files from external hard drive on Mac and Windows.

We need to download and install the software on your computer, and launch it. For recovering from external drive like Seagate, please firstly connect your external drive to the computer, so that the software can detect and scan it.

Step 2. Select File Types to Scan

The project will display the file types to choose in the first window, we can check all or certain types, then click "Start" to select where to recover data,

Step 2. Select External Hard Drive to Recover Files

If your external hard drive has multiple partitions, please select the partition where the file is missing. If there are no partitions, please select external hard drive. Then click "Scan", The external hard drive data recovery software will list all lost files after finishing scanning.

Recover Files from Formatted or Re-partitioned External Hard Drive

When the scan is complete, you could see the lost document, photo, music, archive, email or other files. Please select what you want to retrieve, then click "Recover" and save to a different location.